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15 July, 2008 7:48 am

Reading your Feeds like newspaper with Feedly

Posted by Richard Wong under Tools, Web Apps | 3 Comments

Feedly is “a more social and magazine-like start page for Firefox”. It is a very well made and design application that really take the concept of homepage and RSS aggregation to the next level. They have social features like sharing, annotation and even twitter integration for each post.

But what interest me the most is the ability to do real-time summary of the most relevant content available on the web based on your interests, your reading patterns, and recommendations from your friends. In other words, you can see straightaway the hottest, latest post from your feeds.

After using it for a couple of weeks, I really enjoyed its clean design and functionality. I found myself using it more to do feed reading than Google Reader. The way Feedly organizes the post are far more natural to scan read a large amount of headlines and lead me to discover more interesting posts than before.

The coolest part of Feedly is that it doesn’t replace your beloved Google Reader. It actually integrate very well with it. All your read or star items are always synced that means you can use both to suite your needs.

So go ahead and give it a go at http://www.feedly.com/

8 July, 2008 12:27 am

Becoming a better Javascript Programmer using JSLint

Posted by Richard Wong under Javascript, Tools | 2 Comments

I have recently came across this interesting and useful Javascript tool called JSLint. You feed in your javascript code and JSLint will scan through and looks for problems in your code.

You might ask what is the different between this and debugging using Firebug? Well, although it is only a syntax checker and validator, it is much more stricter and follows proper Code Conventions. In other word, it will tell you errors you normally won’t get.

As you know, Javascript sometimes allows code to be implemented in a sloppy way which could be very troublesome for large complex projects. So I have been using this tool as a reference point to tighten up my javascript code.

So go and paste your code at JSLint and see how your code is doing. But I must warning you, it might hurt your feeling!

Source: JSLint

28 June, 2008 1:06 am

4 Plugins to turbocharge your Firebug

Posted by Richard Wong under Development, Javascript, Tools | 2 Comments

Anyone developing for the web will have at least used or heard of Firebug. It is very powerful tool for debugging and testing any web pages on Firefox. You can live edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

Although Firebug is already packed with features, there are always rooms for extras. Since the creation of Firebug, plugins are being developed to extend the power of Firebug even further. Here is a list of useful plugins for Firebug.

Jiffy

Jiffy provides a very detail and visual view of the Javascript time measurements captured by . It allows you to get information of AJAX requests and other Javascript functions.

YSlow developed by Yahoo! is probably one of most famous Firebug extension out there. It analyzes web page performance and tells you why performance is slow. It gives you information on all the requests, load time, sizes and even give you tips to improve your site speed.

FireCookie

Instead of using other Firefox extensions to view cookies. This Firebug plugin allows developers like you to keep using the firebug interface to debug with cookies. FireCookie gives you the ability to view and manage cookies. It also has a console where you can see when cookies are created, changed or deleted.

FirePHP

For those PHP developers out there, FirePHP is enable you to print to the Firebug Console using simple PHP function call. The main benifit is that all the debugging data are hidden from normal user and you can review in a nicely format within Firebug console.

Updates:

So still want more plugins? You can always build your own. Jan Odvarko of Software is hard has a series of tutorial on creating a Firebug plugin.

9 June, 2008 1:53 am

280 Slides: Using Javascript to build the Keynote on the web

Posted by Richard Wong under Javascript, Tools, Web Apps | 0 Comment

280 Slides a new online slideshow creator among existing services like , Sliderocket, Empressr or Zoho. The first thing you notice with 280 Slides is that it looks pretty similar to Apple Keynote. It has an easy to use interface with a strong feel of a desktop application.

Although, it still cannot replace a desktop application with lack of advance features like charts, styling or effects. It does provide you with interesting ability to integrate with other web services like publishing to , or add media from YouTube and Flickr.

The very interesting thing about this application is that it is built by a Javascript Framework called Cappuccino which is a port of the Apple Cocoa framework. In the process, they made Javascript Objective and calling it Objective-J that they will open source soon. This means developers on the Apple platforms using Objective-C could use this to build web apps a lot easier and at the same time, introducing more people to Cocoa and Objective-C.

Sources:

280 Slides: Like Apple Keynote, But Online [via Techcrunch]

An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino [via Ajaxian]

6 June, 2008 11:41 pm

NitobiBug – Javascript Debugging Script

Posted by Richard Wong under Javascript, Tools | 3 Comments

NitobiBug is a Javascript debugging script that once embedded, it can be used as a object logger and inspection tool. The main selling point of NitobiBug is that it is a light weight script you include in the page. This means it runs across different browsers without the need to install any plugins or extension.

Although the interface and features are not as powerful or rich as Firebug, this is still a handy tool to use when trying to debug on multiple browsers.

You can see a and download it

NitobiBug